Tracking Fruit Flies to Understand the Function of the Nervous System

Researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain have designed open source software that allows tracking the position of Drosophila fruit flies as well as their larvae during behavioral experiments.

Dr. Matthieu Louis, the head of the Spanish team explains: “Until we developed these tools, many researchers relied on expensive commercial hardware and software to study the behavior of larvae and adult flies. Now, virtually anybody can do this kind of research. The value of the software we are proposing is that they are written in a simple programming language, which facilitates their adaptation to new experimental paradigms” Inexpensive, ubiquitous digital cameras, such as webcams are sufficient to capture the movements of the animals and the open source software packages both for the evaluation the video feeds for tracking as well as for later data analysis are available for free (http://buridan.sourceforge.net).

"Apart from ruining your glass of expensive red wine, Drosophila is a central model organism to study, amongst other problems, how brains work. By carefully watching whether flies turn left or right, we aim at understanding how humans make decisions” explained Dr. Alejandro Gomez-Marin, first author in the Spanish team.